Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
Fascists always start by declaring themselves the victims of others. Victimhood is essential to the fascist worldview; it's at its core
Today's Republican Party, intentionally or unwittingly, is following a script.
Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous poem begins with, "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist." But, in fact, first they came for the queer people.
A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.
In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It's director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.
Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people -- with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people -- across German media.
German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of "public display of deviance," enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation's penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.
Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled over 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire.
It was the first major Nazi book-burning and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation.
The Party leaders said, by burning books and literature about gay, lesbian, and trans people that dated back centuries and even millennia, they were consigning to the flames "the intellectual garbage of the past" and were "protecting Germany's youth from deviance."
It wouldn't be the last book burning.
Fascists always start by declaring themselves the victims of others. Victimhood is essential to the fascist worldview; it's at its core. And it's their excuse for destroying other peoples lives.
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